The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1887-03-26
NEW SORT OF BUREAU.
The Novel Enterprise Recently Started by
an Ingenious New York Bachelor.

The Novel Enterprise Recently Started By
an Ingenious New York Bachelor.
Bachelors in New York may rent the
most delightful apartments, dine at the
most approved restaurants and lead in
general a delightfully."- free and careless
| existence. But there is one misery
| which the luckiest of them can not es-
cape, apparently.
Buttons will come off ones clothes,
even though it is an axiom that a first
class tailor's buttons will hang on for
ever. Shirts will fray and rip, socks
wear out and underclothes get torn or
ragged, in spite of all ones caution,
and the question of timely stitch, how
20 procure it with ease and certainty,
becomes as harassing to a tidy man as
a mild but long-continued nightmare.
I To send coat or pair of trousers to
the tailor for single button seems I'M
dignified. Besides it costs about fifty
cents to get it there and back.
And to turn over torn piece
of underclothes or sock with holes in
it to the mercics of the laundry is mere
ly to invite its irreparable ruin. Some
laundresses, indeed, mend clothes they
wash, but after finding silk hose darned
up with cotton once or twice, or fine
shirt sewed up with coarse, dirty thread,
one is disposed to ask whether the REM
edy is not worse than the original dis.
ease. With some melancholy refec-
tions like these running through his
head reporter, glancing down some
want columns in q newspaper a few
days ago, struck suddenly on the adj
vertiSement of Bureau of Mending.
Here was problem of long standing
solved. As the advertisement went on
to say, people living in hotels, in bach
elorS' apartments and in boarding
houses, having neither facilities for
mending nor the practical knowledge
necessary for it, were obliged to throw
away half their clothing before it was
really worn out. An organized Bureau
of Mending could and would do work
for just such people at prices reason
able enough to make it worth their
while to have it done.
The Bureau of Mcnding, as the
reporter found out afterwards, was
planned by a young man who had felt the
lack of just such an establishment HIM
self and saw in it taking business en-
terprise. About q month ago he hired
a room on East Fourteenth street and
started a sort of central office there.
A modest little sign scarcely foot
long, is pinned beneath all the rest of
the heavily weighted house directory,
and mounting two flights of stairs one
finds the room where the bulk of the
mending of the city, the manager
hopes, will soon be done.
The bureau has been in actual oper-
alton less than fortnight and no iudg-
ment can be made now of its success or
failure. As soon as work in any guam
tity comes in, number of sewing
machines will be putin and half dozen
or more girls engaged to run them.
No full list of prices can be given as
yet, either. Socks. however, will be
darned for five cents a pair. Buttons
sewed on for three cents apiece. Shirts
will be rebosomed for thirty-ive cents
an unusually low price, one would
tnink-and new wristbands will be put
on at five cents each. Rips and tears
will be mended, of course, at prices
proportional to the extent of damage
done. All kinds of repairs to dresses,
dressmaking, cutting and fitting will be
done for women. No regular tailor
work is promised, however, not even
the cleaning and pressing of trousers.
Any one who wishes to can send a
postal card to the bureau and articles
will be both sent for and returned free
of messenger charges.
The new system seems to meet n
long-felt want and its success, if it is
well advertised, ought to prove certain.
N, T. Tribune
The Shop-Council.